Thank you Badger & JimH for holding my hand through this step in my learning process!
I believe i have everything up and running, as far as files being recognized and displayed as desired! (I haven't played/tested all files or formats as of yet).
For others that may be in my position:
JRiver will attempt to tag your files upon import. They will not always be accurate. An example might be; if the file is named 'Folk Blues Festival 1962-1966' - JRiver might tag 'season' as 1962 and 'Episode' as 1966 (as it did in my case). It also might place your video file in 'TV Show' or 'Movie' etc. Not to worry, it is somewhat easy to correct. Here's what i did after suggestions from this thread. In the navigation tree choose 'Video' then choose 'files'. This will display all the imported files. Right click the first file in the list on the right pane, choose 'tag'. Now you can make any changes you like to ensure that the files are displayed where you want. Do this for all files and you should be good to go. I know that this seems obvious to many of you, but for a beginner it was a bit of a struggle to get it figured out.
Now as for the files themselves, i've noticed that after clearing the library and re-importing there are always a few files that revert back to the original tag. The xml files reflect the change, so why they are changing i have no idea. Still exploring this behavior.
Thanks again, Tom